Craig Forman (00:01.218)
All right, you ready? David Hanrahan, welcome to Culture Conversations. I am really happy to have you. Thanks for joining me.
David (00:09.016)
Craig, great to see you again. Thanks for having me. Honored to be here.
Craig Forman (00:12.728)
Always, always a pleasure. All right. We have 30 minutes, so I'm not going to waste any time. Let's get at it. Uh, you know, I usually open these, I open these with a, with this big question of where should we begin? But I was doing my research and I, felt like there was a unique question that has the same spirit, but is, uh, for you knowing that something that you've spoken about before, uh, I've heard you talk about this idea that HR or people operations holds up a mirror to, uh, to culture. And that just really stuck with me. I kept thinking about it as we were preparing for this. So I figured.
That's a pretty broad big picture question. We've got a lot going on in the world, culture, internally, externally, HR, you've done this a lot of organizations. So let's just start there. What do you mean when you say that and what comes to mind?
David (00:55.5)
Well, I think an average employee's experience working with HR, the typical experiences I met, I met a recruiter, I had a recruiting experience, and then maybe I met someone in PeopleOps or Comprbenefits to go through some stuff on my day one, then maybe later on, I have an experience with an HR business partner. Those are oftentimes tough. Like I'm dealing with something, I have an issue, I wanna sort of like work through it with someone.
And on the latter point, the business partner role, which is one of the hardest roles in a company, let alone HR, when times are tough,
That's really the true culture of the company, true values, like what the company really believes in. So I could see something in a hallway on a wall saying, those are the company values. That's nice. But that's only so valid and real as to what the company acts like when times are tough.
When I say when times are tough is like if I've got to let someone go or there's an experience someone is having that's frustrating for them, like how do we interact with them in those scenarios? And so the business partner gets roped into that. They're oftentimes right in there when times are tough, the business partner is front and center. So if you have an experience with a business partner where it's it's cold, it's like there's not a lot of like empathy here, there's not very like timely.
like, wow, I shot this heartfelt message out and they didn't get back to me until a week later. Or it kind of feels as though the explanation I got was very cookie cutter on something that is really important to me. That's the culture of the company. No matter what you're saying on your walls or on your placards or whatever, the CEO might not know about it. Some of the executive team members might not know about it.
Craig Forman (02:39.799)
Mm.
David (02:52.29)
But like one way or another, that's the culture of the company. similarly, it can be a disconnect if like, I had this great recruiting experience, my recruiter was amazing, but from day one onwards, this is so clunky and this is so like, doesn't seem like anyone care. Like I feel like I was sold a bill of goods, like you recruited me in, but then I was just another number as soon as I got in here. When I mean by your onboarding experience. So I'm really good managers.
are a bit of an antidote to that, the, when I say like, you'll kind of hold up the people, the people team holds up the mirror on culture.
But if that's the experience, that's really more the true reflection of the culture. So I think it becomes really important for the people team to be a role model of the values. Now the people team, HR business partners listening to this might say, well, I deal with the opposite issue. Like we're great. It's those leaders, those managers who are oftentimes the ones I'm trying to influence them and trying to get them to do the right thing. And that's the disconnect. That's when the culture is not great is all these leaders
who don't live up to the values that we have. Sure, and those are sort of inconsistent, those are sort of isolated. Similarly, HR business partners have oftentimes insurmountable task to also address that, to also be effective at driving change in the leadership competencies of sort of like how we actually show up together.
One of the great articles on culture that I've always enjoyed citing is the culture factor. think it was written, an HPR article from many years back. And they talked about in there how, you know, that there's eight different types of company cultures. And, you know, what they found was that there is, there's eight different types of company cultures that you could look at.
David (04:55.404)
But it's not as if one is better than the other.
what becomes important on things like engagement and net positives from your culture is the overall convergence of culture. Meaning, we have one type of company culture or we actually have a different type of company culture depending on if you're in sales or finance or you're in this office or that office, you have divergence, you have a divergent culture. I was in a conversation one day where I was
like my proposition was the CHRO is like the chief convergence officer. know, the people leader needs to be that voice for like, hey, if we're actually not showing up the right way as a leadership team or divergent or messages are mixed on this one important difficult topic. Similarly, all the way back up to the chief people officer.
is a reflection of the culture, particularly on those things that are outside of our control. So I can kind of control a little bit of the business partner effectiveness. I can kind of control that. I have indirect control over the relative behaviors of the leadership team, but yet it's still on me to influence that. And it's still on me and my overall effectiveness if we are collectively as a leadership team, a mirror on the culture.
Craig Forman (05:55.978)
Yeah.
Craig Forman (06:18.347)
Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, I hear myself more younger version myself and like, this almost sounds cliche, but I keep going back to it is really the power of what I've seen in good organizations are the power of values. And like, to your point, if they're on the wall and you're not living them, I heard this term once. Well, I didn't claim the term, but catfishing, which is another term, right? When people mirror to be somebody that they're not, I love that they said, don't be, don't catfish at your organization. Don't say you're one thing and be another. Right. As I love when things get simplified, like
So I think organizations don't catfish your employees, be honest with them. But the power, I feel like to your point, any one of us, and we have 300, 500, a thousand plus people only has so much true influence on the culture. If we truly live by our values, mean, uphold them all the way to the top. Those are kind of the underpinnings of how we can all get aligned and act in some sort of accordance. I mean, what do you think about that? Do you see that as the same, the power, the values, if we live them are the thing that helped keep us aligned in all these disparate situations?
David (07:16.311)
Yeah.
Craig Forman (07:16.727)
Ahem.
David (07:17.196)
Yeah, think, you know, when in doubt values or sometimes even leadership principles, which are a little bit of an offshoot of the values. It's like if we do these things as leaders, then we'll get, we'll arrive at this sort of this destination, which is the values you were describing. But, you know, values help us make decisions when information is abstract or we're having a hard time or when it feels like this is a judgment call. Like this isn't going to be a decision we can rely, we can solely rely on data for, but we need to make a judgment call here.
that is this judgment call is gonna affect people. It's gonna affect people potentially internally or externally. So like, hey, what do we believe in? Let's go back to what these things mean. And when I was at Twitter, actually had two values that conflicted with each other, which was really interesting. And the values themselves are...
Craig Forman (08:07.905)
Heh.
David (08:12.736)
are oftentimes a little bit of like a gray area in them. Like, hey, here's how I interpret it. And I think that's not a bad thing. I think if you use them to sort of debate and discuss and try and like, we still need to use our judgment here, but what do these things tell us? You know, if we, like at Twitter we talked about, you know, we said ship it, but then be rigorous and get it right. Well, which one is it? You know, do we ship it or do we be rigorous and get it right?
Craig Forman (08:39.831)
You
David (08:41.582)
And we debate this stuff around like, is the essence of what this means? Maybe we can actually do both. Maybe we actually can do both. But they were so impactful for us. They were so helpful that we would have conversations at the executive level about decisions and use the values as a bit of of a litmus test on.
Craig Forman (09:06.199)
Yeah. And I think what else I'm thinking about, I'm going to buy you because I think it plays into this, but you said earlier, you mentioned, you know, maybe the CEO doesn't know what's going on. The truth is again, 200, 500, a thousand people. You can't expect any one person to know what's going on. what are, like, how do you see leadership's role if it's beyond, you know, we've been talking about the values, but just how do you think about that? Because that is a dilemma in organizations. How do we build and maintain a culture typically in these hierarchical ways where
We can't see all the layers. can't see the impact. So like, how do you think about that when you're working with that top tier of C-level executives, their role in that when they can't experience or see everything that's happening?
David (09:47.906)
Well, I know that my CEO, Sudhakar, really believes in AMAs and gets out quite a bit. So spends a lot of time in our different sites, having skip level meetings, trying to have direct access with staff so there's not this like big divide, you know.
And I remember something Laszlo Bach told me a while ago when I was asking about like, how did you kind of scale culture at Google as like massive company, but widely known as at the time, having built a really phenomenal culture that everyone will be part of? Like, how did you scale that in terms of like, you know, what was going on in the culture and what is, what is it like, what really is our culture beyond these, like these pithy statements we're saying. And he described storytelling as a really important part of how they built culture.
And what I mean by that is, and we're talking about this right now, we have 2,100 employees at SolarWinds, our Solarians. And I don't really know about the experience of all 2,100 employees. I can do an engagement survey and I get some data here.
But we probably had this experience when you read a comment though, just one comment sometimes can open my eyes up to what's going on for someone's experience so much more than me reading all this really great data that's been statistically validated and has heat maps and all this sort of stuff on it. And can you do that at scale? Can we have a bit of a video series of a three to five minute video, I get to watch once a week, where someone's experience, this is who I am, this is my experience,
Craig Forman (11:20.023)
There it is.
David (11:25.454)
But it's also a little bit of like who you are outside of work and like, wow, these are the people that we work with and they have phenomenal stories and they do things in their life that like makes me proud that I get to work with them. I didn't know that. Like the stuff that we don't know that can't be read on a spreadsheet or an engagement survey or on, you know, it's so storytelling. Back to your question, how does the CEO really know? Think I have to hear about some stories that that just shed a whole new light on what's really going on in the
Craig Forman (11:47.124)
I to God.
David (11:55.408)
culture.
Craig Forman (11:56.023)
Yeah, the power of stories. You also in that mentioned something I wanted to talk about, which I know about your background. You've been at this for a while and you've done this at some really great companies. You've done it through COVID and you've done it through growth. You've taken companies IPO, but you've also had to scale down companies, which really it was an opportunity for me to ask the question. I love to ask this question of how do we think about culture as we grow and all the positive, but the reality is how do we think about culture as we grow, as we shrink, as we hit challenging times, positive times?
Basically as organizations change as they do, and you've gotten to witness this firsthand, I think the biggest question I'm always thinking about is what do we hold onto as organizations change and grow around culture? And how do you balance that with your teams of what do we need to let go of and what do we hold onto?
David (12:39.34)
Yeah, I'll contrast like two different types of companies and maybe the first one is much more common than I think, but I haven't been in this type of company a lot.
Shell Oil many, many years ago might be the one example of this type of company. But take a company that's got a long history, generally doesn't change too much from year to year. So it's a hundred year old history, like their overall size, like their headcount's not really changing, their business is not changing. It is like, hey, we're steady Eddie. Like, you know, like we have the same clients, like it's, you know, it's predictable.
You know, those exist at like sort of family shops, like family run businesses on up to very large businesses. That's a company with culture that is in cement. know, like this is, it's gonna be immovable to try and change this culture. When I was at Eventbrite, we had to let go almost half the company from COVID wiping out our business.
It was different than growth, but they're the same thing. So a company that's growing 2X or a company that's going down by half is a major change. And to me...
Obviously, one of those is unfortunate and is like dealing with human emotions and impact. But to me, both of them have this potential to transform, to transform the culture of the company because of this change. The culture is suddenly not cement. Wow, everything is up for grabs here. Everything needs to be rethought. And that was the case at Twitter. I'm sorry, was the case at Eventbrite. Twitter was growth for sure. But Eventbrite, when we had to cut by half,
David (14:27.692)
That was the case. And we started rethinking the values of the company. Obviously, we rethought deeply whether we're in office or remote. That was an in-office culture. was like 97 % of the company worked in an office five days a week. Remote was like super, super rare. They talked about the Breitling experience as the ultimate live experience. They really drank this Kool-Aid around.
Craig Forman (14:54.315)
And that was your company, was about live experiences, right? It was part of it.
David (14:57.408)
a live experience, like being with each other, like visceral live experience, us right next to each other. And so COVID, the RIF, the business model change, like we went from a very sales led business to more a self-serve, like kind of tech enabled business.
virtual events over live concerts, was really like, it created the seeds for the platform to reevaluate and transform the culture. And so I think of a company where it's like there's someone banging their head against the wall, man, this one part of the culture is really bugging me.
that company in cement, it's like, yeah, you're out of luck there. You're probably not going to change the culture of that company. But when you go through...
a massive change, whether it's down, up or up, meaning positive or negative, that is your opportunity to really like emerge stronger is how we thought about it. Like, hey, like, I mean, a lot of live events companies were going out of business in COVID. And I think we had our sort of crosshairs on us of like, they're surely gonna go under next. I remember having a conversation with a neighbor and he's like, your company is going under. your Eventbrite is going under.
And we're all afraid, but behind the scenes, Julia, the CEO, was like, we're going to emerge stronger. And we were all like, what are you talking about? How could you possibly think that? That was the goal. And we set that goal as well from a cultural perspective. How can we, we're going to tear it down to the studs and rebuild it. How are we going to emerge stronger from this? And we set that goal as a culture.
Craig Forman (16:39.831)
You talk a lot about candor in our conversations that we've had. And I know you, you're your director, honest. How did you, how did you apply candor and empathy in that very difficult situation? Especially when we see so many examples of companies not doing that when they're laying people off. Are your thoughts around that?
David (16:58.144)
my gosh, I remember a particular All Hands right after the big riff. It was like 45 % riff. That was April, 2020. Yeah. it was April and then it was like April, May, June. I think it was like June. I remember a June All Hands. It was like one of the first or second All Hands after that.
Craig Forman (17:03.031)
Ooh, that's big.
David (17:21.386)
where we were kind of making a case for this is what we're gonna do. Like there's, remember a quote, it might've been Thomas Friedman, like the role of leaders.
during times of uncertainty is to put more truth in the world or something like that. was a quote I remember. And it was like, what that means is what you know and what you don't know. And we could all sort of go back to that era of when we were all dealing with uncertainty about COVID and who amongst us didn't have the desire as a leader to spin things, to say like, you know, I remember all those like, we had Zoom happy hours with each other.
There's a belief, think, that leaders probably felt this, leaders and HR, HR visit partners, leaders felt this like onus to try and like rally the troops to try and like, and that meant like spinning things. That meant like, well, hey, this might all change soon. So, like, we'll see you back in the office. There's all that spinning. But so that quote that resonated for me was, you know what, we got to treat people like adults and be honest. There's going to be stuff that we know that we don't know.
Craig Forman (18:03.511)
Board games online, no one knew how to do it.
David (18:33.07)
And we took a little bit of an approach of let people vent. Like we're all gonna get on together. I remember living in Oakland and there was a thing, I'm not sure if this was worldwide or what, but there was definitely a thing in Oakland where like every night at like 7 p.m. people would open their windows and just scream. And just scream into the wind during the first few months of COVID or whatever.
And our employees were, they were hurt, they were frustrated, they were scared, like, we just let go half the company. You're saying we need to be a tech driven business now. That means engineering. We don't have a CTO at that time. We see some of our engineers getting poached by some companies, COVID was good for them. Some companies like Instacart, an example, like.
Craig Forman (19:21.429)
Zoom.
David (19:22.382)
Zoom, know, it was good for them. And like, hey, we're losing all our engineers to Zoom. How are we going to become a tech-driven business if we can't hang on to our engineers? And I remember there was, we do ask me any things and there was a question about our engineering attrition.
And I'm gonna say, here's what I know, here's what I don't yet know is kind of a general tact. And someone sort of said like, we just want you to solve it. And like, it was like this like emotional like response from someone in front of others. And I just had to sit there and sort of like, you know, I just kind of absorbed it. And I said, listen, thank you, I hear you. That's all I can say, I hear what you're saying. And...
Craig Forman (19:56.577)
That's it.
David (19:58.99)
you know, like maybe another approach would have been to like try and debate them or to try and say, here's why think you're wrong. Here's why it's not an issue for us. Here's why we're not worried about it. And I just let the person share their emotion with me in front of others. And there was like a catharsis in it. anyways, don't know how we got on this topic, but there's kind of adding more truth in the world in terms of what you know, what you don't know.
was a bit of a sort of MO that we had during all that.
Craig Forman (20:32.587)
Well, two things. One is this idea. I think what you hit on that I think a lot about is oftentimes I think organizations are scared to ask or scared of these conversations. So what if we don't know how to respond? And I think what you just said is the powerful thing. You don't always need to have an answer. Sometimes people just want to be seen. And in our fear of not having the answer, we shut people down and then we make it worse. And that was one. The other was I asked a question about the changes and we talked about COVID.
But I had a very visceral experience as you're responding, but I mean, it's it's funny. Like, it don't often go back to that time, you know, but like, I don't know about you and you're talking about just like, yeah, we did that. Like that really happened. That was just, I had this very like almost tingles in my body of what we went through. And here we are five, six years later. Okay. So what I want to do next is because it's you, because I know that you have, I've just, you know, things to say about, I appreciate your perspective. So.
different here is I have a series of five kind of these big core, I think topics. There's a prompt for others in the space. So they're broad and I'm just going to throw them out one at a time and just get your take on how you're thinking about these things today. And these are the, think some of the big ones that we're all thinking about in, in organizational culture and HR and people ops. Let's just start the big one employee engagement. When you hear that, when you think about that, what's coming up for you, what are you thinking about these days?
David (21:54.766)
Well, I believe for long time, I believe all the research that employee engagement drives positive outcomes for businesses. I believe that the aggregate, you oftentimes don't see it immediately. So there's a lagging effect, I believe, on engagement as opposed to, oh, the engineering team engagement just jumped up quarter over quarter. Let's look at how fast they're shipping code now. There's just not gonna be that immediate effect.
But that, you know, no, no, it's okay. All right.
Craig Forman (22:25.751)
It's okay, you need to go, is somebody at your door or something? We can always clip out. Okay.
David (22:31.722)
So the engagement, though, I think some of the struggles I've had on engagement is the lack of immediacy on it. The lagging effect of engagement of like, we did this survey, did this point in time survey, and then we look at the results a month later, and then we start talking about results the weeks after that, and then we put the action plan in place.
There are two things I want to say. I think there's a really big opportunity for real-time engagement. This has been explored before. From everything from a company that was making rings that all the employees could put around their finger, and you'd have the mood of the employees in real time. There was one company that had watches that they made the watches that could tell you your sleep patterns and such.
I remember that chief people officer of that company saying, yeah, we got all our employees to wear those. And I can see their sleep habits. But so.
Craig Forman (23:34.743)
Nice.
David (23:36.398)
So the idea of real-time engagement and sort a real-time pulse, you know, no pun intended, of the company has been a bit of a holy grail. And now I think with AI, you and I have talked about this before, there are certainly companies that are out there now that want to plug into Slack, plug into all the conversations that are happening in the company, and then give you a readout on those very same things that the big engagement company asks about and you do a survey on.
and you spend a lot of time thinking about it in the coming weeks and months, this company says, we could do it with you right now. And you'll see things that are changing, ebbing and flowing, based off of real conversations that are happening. And you can do things that will have a real near-term effect on engagement.
That's really cool and powerful and big brother-ish. The other thing that I think that we oftentimes lose sight of is its engagement does exist at the individual level as well. Individual motivators and how well my direct report is motivated, like the things that are important to her and how well those motivators are getting met. As if anyone's listening to me talk before you've heard me go on and on about the motivational pie chart, which is a really great exercise.
which is like, wish I had that. I wish I had that in real time for my direct reports as well.
Craig Forman (24:55.329)
There's a link to you shared it before. you share it with me, I'll put it in the show notes. So everybody take a look and it'll be in the show notes.
David (25:01.198)
It's an awesome exercise and like, gosh, if you could do that in real time, how amazing. Now people would say, well, isn't that even more big brother? Cause you're talking about someone's individual versus the aggregate and aggregate teams engagement that's happening from Slack is different than, well, how would I know how someone individually is feeling right now?
I think the idea of privacy, you know, as, as it relates to AI is going to continue to be a topic that gets explored, you know, like at at a more, at a more broader level, society, politics, you know, certainly in corporations. I think there's good that can come from it though, balancing it effectively that enables managers to do better things, to do the right things by their staff, because I didn't know this, I didn't have this information, suddenly had this information. I can make better calls now. I can.
I can do better things with my direct report that unlocks more of her potential, that gets her more jazzed about her job. But it's the privacy element that I think we still haven't really crossed yet. Anyways, these are thoughts I have on engagement.
Craig Forman (26:07.061)
Yeah. Yeah. And you, know, it's funny. I when you were saying big brother, I agree. think about this a lot. Big brother is listening and not talking. And it goes back to what you said you did with that person during COVID. Don't miss the value of that. think sometimes in our, in our desire for data and information, the relational part was the fact that that person had the space to say that to you even without an answer. And I think that's what sometimes when we engage in these listening exercises, could you get the information somewhere? Yes. Else yes.
but are you giving up the opportunity to say, interact with us, let's have a conversation and okay, let's go to the next one, performance management. How you thinking about that?
David (26:46.956)
Well, I gotta bring it back to AI and I was having a conversation. There's a lot of innovation on, well, there's a lot of attempts right now to take an AI-based approach to performance management. I actually think this is even more interesting, a more interesting area to apply AI, possibly even then the engagement one I just talked about.
Performance management has all these, there's all these aggregate viewpoints, like my one-on-one notes, like our verbal conversations, that might've been in a Zoom transcript someplace, probably not. Certainly emails and slacks. There's conversations about my direct reports that are happening right now that I'm not even aware of. They are in meetings, they're in meetings, and like organizational network analysis, ONA tries to look at this, of like some people go into certain meetings
and good things come of it. So when this person's present, something happens in that meeting that is positive. And we can kind of measure that. When this person goes to a meeting, bad things happen.
But the conversations that exist right now, without me knowing it, create a picture of performance that currently exists. That it does exist in the aggregate enterprise tools of email, of all Slack and instant messages, of Zoom transcripts, of notes, back and forth comments in Docs, all that sort of stuff. Comments between two people in private about someone is existing. So there's a sentiment there about what David is good at and what he's
not good at that my boss is not aware of. And wouldn't it be better to unlock that somehow without revealing what people like what individuals are saying? Like there's this is a validated view of David of the three things that he's doing really well, there's one thing, you know?
Craig Forman (28:34.519)
100 conversations.
David (28:37.538)
And we can kind of put David on a spectrum. Like David is generally a mediocre leader at this company. Here's one thing he's doing well, but here's something that if he improves on, it can unlock him and put him on a whole nother level for the role he's in. There is that information that exists. And I was talking with someone who was trying to innovate on this, like, hey, we've got an AI for performance management. looked at the platform. It looks exactly like ChatGPT. I'm like, well, you're off to the right start here. It looks exactly like ChatGPT.
But what it was doing, wasn't really, in my knowledge, it wasn't really AI. was kind of looking at how many lines of code the person has put in there, what their quota attainment is, what we say that a really good seller at that level should be doing. And so here's my recommendation for what you should begin to speak about with them. But it wasn't giving me all this knowledge about what is actually happening with this seller and the client calls that I'm not in.
In my last company, we started to adopt an AI tool that would listen to the calls between the seller and the client. Manager can't join all those calls. AI can. AI can actually give a readout to, you're not handling objections very well. This is something that you're saying that you should try to say differently. And then manager, by the way, maybe you can help them with this, manager. so we're starting to create this picture. I don't want to do performance
reviews like I've done them. Everyone's tired of them and it's because the manager shouldn't be in this mode. Someone told me the other day that an average manager can spend over 100 hours on performance management in a year. And I think it's because of that, that trying to aggregate all this information, the human cognition of like, I'm trying to like grab all this information and give you a perspective here that I don't feel confident in. I'm trying my best to tell you what I think.
Craig Forman (30:10.303)
every
David (30:35.284)
I should be in this role of like, look at all this information. I'm your coach. We can look at this together and like, I think it's fair. think that's right. What the AI tool is saying about, I think that's fair. I think you should work on this. Maybe I got some ideas, right? The role of manager should be there, not trying to aggregate all this information, you know, and like, and be on top of it at all times. AI can do that.
Craig Forman (30:48.534)
Mm-hmm.
Craig Forman (30:53.335)
Yeah. Two thoughts. One is between the lines of what, you were talking is, is really with AI, the power we have today, even this idea, have the paradigm shift of this idea that you're supposed to stop periodically to do this whole thing where it's like what I'm hearing with the, with, with the, the, software is how do we make performance and development and all happening all the time and empowering our managers. And the other thing I'll say, and I've always known this, but even more in
You know, I work with companies both on two main things, like engagement and running surveys and listening and performance management. And it really hit me. I've known this and you know this, but it hit me in my work that when, I do engagement, in the end, everybody's pretty on board because I, when it's all said and done, I'm able, we're able to deliver something really powerful to leaders. And they're like, cool. Like I got something that I really wanted. When we do performance, it only validates for me. What I've always known is nobody likes it. Now.
I don't suggest we not do it. It's a necessary evil, but I still think it's such an opportunity. The executives don't like it. The employees don't like it. Managers don't like it. We've always known that it's people don't have always said they don't enjoy performance management. And I'm not the tech person to solve that. I'd love to be part of that conversation, but gosh, what an opportunity to solve because we have a system that we have to do and no one likes it. And what does that tell us? And we just keep making better versions of the bad thing versus really rethinking it. So, okay, here's the
David (32:18.318)
Yeah.
Craig Forman (32:20.009)
Last one for time's sake, man, I have to ask this and it's funny how much it shifted in six weeks, but there you are at company of 2,000 people, DE and I, like how are you processing this right now, organizationally with your leaders, with your people? Talk about change and fast and attitudes and weaponization, the whole thing. I just wanted to get your take. It wouldn't be right to end this without asking.
David (32:43.298)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, we're two white males about to talk about diversity for a second. So like with all those caveats aside, you know, I feel really confident we're going to continue our, we call it inclusion and belonging. So some companies say we use the acronym DEI. Some of them it's like D-E-I-B-B or dibs or, whatever. It's like for us, you know, the work has been framed as inclusion and belonging.
Craig Forman (32:49.419)
Yeah, we are.
Craig Forman (33:03.745)
Be. Yeah.
David (33:12.736)
And we're going to continue the work that we've been doing. And I was just, we have an inclusion belonging lead in my team. I've been talking with her about our objectives. There is some, I think there's probably some, you know, beneath the surface tactical changes, but the philosophy that I've talked about, our CFO, our CMO, myself with our IMB committee and our IMB lead, we said, listen, whatever is going on outside the globe right now, you see some companies are saying we're completely disbanding our efforts.
on DEI, you see some other companies saying the opposite. Like, we're going to go back to, this makes us stronger, the research is clear, companies that are more diverse, that do better at fostering inclusion and belonging, they make better decisions, they better support their customers. Like, we're capitalists. We're here to serve our shareholders, our customers, our communities that we operate in, and our employees.
We like nothing has changed in terms of like inclusion, belonging, diversity, inclusion. These help us make, become a better company. we, like it pins back to our business that we're trying to operate and that's not changing.
So we think that there's like beneath the surface, some tactical things that now are like, you know, there's gonna be a legislation that emerges that says, hey, there's preferential treatment and there's things that, know, there's setting of goals that is, know, tantamount to reverse discrimination. You shouldn't do that. It's not really gonna change a lot of the work that we do. That is really ultimately at the end of the day, we need to become a more inclusive company that fosters belonging. And we think in general, being more diverse is as a company,
Craig Forman (34:45.857)
There it is.
David (34:54.16)
where the diversity, we're representing our customers better. For instance, our customers sit all over the globe and they speak different languages. They kind of come from different backgrounds. In our customer teams, in our sales teams, it's just like if we're all one type of person in those teams, we're gonna do worse. It's gonna be a part of leadership. So the leadership competency on inclusion and belonging, it's just gonna be of like how you lead. It's gonna be how you lead
And some of beneath the surface tactical changes are not a big deal for us. That's not gonna help. It's not gonna change fundamentally the work that we do.
Craig Forman (35:32.129)
It's great. I think regardless of our skin color, you're sitting in that seat right now where the world needs to hear what people like you, women, men, everybody is thinking about this. Cause I think it's, it's gotten quiet and just to help circulate that and let people hear what people are thinking about how approaching it. And I, what I hear there is a terms of term, a term can be weaponized values, beliefs, how we run our company, what's best and the data approach. still holds. It still holds. was right then it's right now.
And we're going to navigate this external culture as we build our best businesses. And I believe in the end, we're going to see that the data is right and we're going to see it in business outcomes. So thanks. Thanks for sharing that. I know it's tricky one right now. Okay. So I always wrap by anything. What are other books, movies, podcasts, Ted talks, things that have inspired you or you're like, Hey, if you like what I had to say, here's something else I've always enjoyed. And I'd like to share with you.
David (36:24.575)
Gosh, lately I buy books just to put them on my, my end table. Like that's I've got four. I've got four. I'm, I'm like on tick tock late at late on night on a Friday, I'm having a drink and I'm like, I'm on book talk. There's like, you know, like the book reviews, these, these book reviewers on tick tock, they're like, Hey, here's all the books I've read in the past week. And they have like a stack and I'm like, okay, I'm, and I suddenly get like ambitious. I'm like, all right, I'm to do something. So I'm going to read all those books.
Craig Forman (36:32.038)
I buy them thinking I'm gonna read them, but they end up in my end table.
Craig Forman (36:48.695)
can't do.
David (36:53.982)
and they're all on my end table. So I can't give you book recommendations because I haven't read any of them lately. But, you know, let's see on on people that I like to follow and look up to. know, I'm I'm I'm really into everything that Lars publishes and posts on LinkedIn. Like any time he posts something, usually, you know, I kind of I lean into it and I'm intrigued.
Craig Forman (37:22.027)
That's Lars Schmidt for anybody listening. I'll tag him below. But yeah, good. Nice plug for Lars.
David (37:25.43)
Yeah. And on the topic of inclusion of belonging and who's got some really great things that they're saying there that make that really good practical sense, the Athena team, Melanie and Roxanne, and those are two that have some really great practical sentiments around moving forward on that. So I thought I'd give them a shout out.
Craig Forman (37:47.285)
Yeah, I just had an idea while you're talking. I think we should start maybe a TikTok thread where it's all let me tell you about all the books I bought this month. Maybe maybe not the books I've read. We can like start one of like all the books I've bought recently that have not been read.
David (37:54.615)
Yeah.
David (37:58.318)
Yeah, I'm gonna start a book review, five second book reviews. I'm like, all right, this book haven't read it. End of TikTok. That's my book review. Yeah.
Craig Forman (38:06.817)
Here's the book I bought. David, look, when I pivot to long form podcasting, you're gonna be one of the first, because I really enjoy our conversations. Thanks for hitting all the big ones with me today. And I just wanna say, again, I appreciate you. I appreciate the work, how you show up, your authenticity, and I'm grateful that we get to continue this journey and that you're willing to be part of this and share. And I'm excited to share this with more people. So thank you.
David (38:31.426)
Very cool. Thank you. Thanks so much, Craig.
Craig Forman (38:33.483)
Yep.
